Settlers race across the border into Indian Territory as a signal opens the area to white settlement in Oklahoma City on April 22, 1889. (AP Photo)
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
April 22, 2025
Today in history:
On April 22, 1889, the Oklahoma Land Rush began at noon as thousands of homesteaders staked claims to nearly 1.9 million acres of land that was formerly part of Indian Territory; by the end of the day, the cities of Oklahoma City and Guthrie were established with as many as 10,000 settlers each.
In 1915, German forces unleashed its first full-scale use of chlorine gas against Allied troops at the start of the Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium during World War I; thousands of Allied soldiers are believed to have died from the poison gas attacks.
In 1954, the publicly televised sessions of the Senate Army-McCarthy hearings began.
In 1970, an estimated 20 million Americans participated in gatherings for the first “Earth Day,” a series of events proposed by Senator Gaylord Nelson to promote environmental protections.
In 1994, Richard M. Nixon, the 37th president of the United States and the first to resign from office, died at a New York hospital four days after having a stroke; he was 81.
In 2000, in a dramatic pre-dawn raid, armed immigration agents seized 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy at the center of a custody dispute, from his relatives’ home in Miami; Elian was reunited with his father at Andrews Air Force Base near Washington.
In 2005, Zacarias Moussaoui pleaded guilty in a federal courtroom outside Washington, D.C., to conspiring with the Sept. 11 hijackers to kill Americans. (Moussaoui was sentenced to life in prison in May 2006.)
In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil platform, operated by BP, sank into the Gulf of Mexico two days after a massive explosion that killed 11 workers.
Earth day members of the Penn community organized Philadelphia’s very first Earth Day events, culminating on April 22, 1970.
About 30,000 people crowded into Fairmount Park to hear speakers and performers. (Image: University Archives)
